The risks arising from Asia's water stress

The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : The risks arising from Asia's water stress

• Water, the most vital of all resources, has emerged as a key issue that would determine if Asia is headed toward cooperation or competition.
• After all, the driest continent in the world is not Africa but Asia, where availability of freshwater is not even half the global annual average of 6,380 cubic metres per inhabitant.
• When the estimated reserves of rivers, lakes, and aquifers are added up, Asia has less than one-tenth of the waters of South America, Australia and New Zealand, not even one-fourth of North America, almost one-third of Europe, and moderately less than Africa per inhabitant.
• Yet the world's fastest-growing demand for water for food and industrial production and for municipal supply is in Asia, which now serves as the locomotive of the world economy.
• Today, the fastest-growing Asian economies are all at or near water-stressed conditions, including China, India, South Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia
• But just three or four decades ago, these economies were relatively free of water stress.
• Water, the new arena of conflict
• Asia continues to draw on tomorrow's water to meet today's needs.
• Asia has one of the lowest levels of water efficiency and productivity in the world.
• it is no exaggeration to say that the water crisis threatens Asia's economic and political rise and its environmental sustainability.
• Water has also emerged as a source of increasing competition and discord within and between nations, spurring new tensions over shared basin resources and local resistance to governmental or corporate decisions to set up water-intensive industries.
• Water is a new arena in the Asian Great Game.
• In fact, water wars — in a political, diplomatic, or economic sense — are already being waged between riparian neighbours in several Asian regions, fuelling a cycle of bitter recrimination and fostering mistrust that impedes broader regional cooperation and integration. Without any shots being fired, rising costs continue to be exacted. The resources of transnational rivers, aquifers, and lakes have become the target of rival appropriation plans.
• Grand projects; crisis factors
• Several factors have contributed to the Asian water crisis, which is leading to river and aquifer degradation.
• One key factor responsible for the water crisis is that Asia is not only the largest and most-populous continent but also the fastest-developing continent. How the swift economic rise of Asia has brought water resources under increasing pressure can be seen from the fact that most Asian economies now are water-stressed.
• The exceptions are few: Bhutan, Burma, Papua New Guinea, Laos, Cambodia, Brunei, and Malaysia.
• Another factor is consumption growth, as a consequence of rising prosperity. The plain fact is that the average Asian is consuming more resources, including water, food, oil, and energy. The consumption growth is best illustrated by the changing diets, especially the greater intake of meat, whose production is notoriously water-intensive.
• A third factor is the role of irrigation in accentuating the Asian water stress. Asia more than doubled its total irrigated cropland just between 1960 and 2000.
• Once a continent of serious food shortages and recurrent famines, Asia opened the path to its dramatic economic rise by emerging as a net food exporter on the back of this unparalleled irrigation expansion.
• three sub-regions of Asia—South Asia, China, and Southeast Asia — by themselves account for about 50 per cent of the world's total irrigated land.
• It is thus hardly a surprise that Asia leads the world in the total volume of freshwater withdrawn for agriculture. Indeed, almost 74 per cent of the total global freshwater withdrawals for agriculture by volume are made in Asia alone.
• A fourth factor is that the fastest increase in water demand in Asia is now coming not from agriculture but from the industrial sector and urban households, in keeping with the fact that this continent has become the seat of the world's fastest industrialisation and urbanisation.
• A final factor linked to Asia's water stress is the large-scale impoundment of water resources through dams, barrages, reservoirs, and other human-made structures without factoring in long-term environmental considerations.
• upstream dams on rivers shared by two or more nations or provinces in an era of growing water stress often carry broader political and social implications, especially because they can affect water quality and quantity downstream.
• Dams can also alter fluvial ecosystems, damage biodiversity, and promote coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion.
• China, the world's biggest dam builder, alone has slightly more than half of the approximately 50,000 large dams on the planet.
• A way out
• To contain the security risks, Asian states must invest more in institutionalised cooperation on transboundary basin resources in order to underpin strategic stability, protect continued economic growth, and promote environmental sustainability.
• The harsh truth is that only four of the 57 transnational river basins in Asia have a treaty covering water sharing or other institutionalised cooperation. These are the Mekong, Ganges, Indus and Jordan river basins.
• The absence of a cooperative arrangement in most Asian transnational basins is making inter-country water competition a major security risk, increasing the likelihood of geopolitical tensions and instabilities.
• With its multitude of inter-country basins, Asia cannot continue to prosper without building political and technological partnerships to help stabilise inter-riparian relations, encourage greater water efficiency, promote environmental sustainability, take on practicable conservation strategies, and invest in clean-water technologies.
• If Asian states are to address their water challenges, they will need to embrace good practices on the strategic planning and management of water resources.